1. All ancient dates, i.e.,
those pertaining to Socrates's life and the contemporaneous sources for
his life, are B.C.E. (before the common era). All dates of modern and
contemporary sources are C.E. (of the common era).

2.
Two men are credited with initiating the genre of Socratic
discourses: Alexamenos (Aristotle, fr. 72 Rose ap. Athenaeus 11.505c),
doubted by many because no extant works or fragments mention him in
connection with Socrates; and the Athenian Antisthenes, whom Plato's
Phaedo includes among those present at Socrates's execution.
There are several surviving fragments from Aeschines of Sphettus, also
present at Socrates's execution, but none from Euclides of Megara, a
speaker in Theaetetus and present at the
execution—unless one takes Theaetetus 143b-c literally
to mean that Euclides was the author of the dialogue, an implausible
suggestion. Ancient librarians catalogued the titles of Socratic
discourses in their possession supposedly written by others known
through the dialogues—Aristippus of Cyrene, Cebes of Thebes,
Crito of Alopece (Athens), Glaucon of Collytus (Athens), Phaedo of
Elis, and Simmias of Thebes—as well as by the Athenian Simon (a
leatherworker whose shop abutted the marketplace of Athens, unearthed
by archaeologists in the early 1950s). Still other supposed writers
are known only from the librarians' lists—Bryson, Polyaenus,
Polyxenus—but by the time of the cataloguing, many forgeries
were circulating as well as many discourses of uncertain authorship,
so these should be viewed skeptically. In Plato's Academy, for
example, it was a standard practice to write in dialogue form
(Aristotle wrote dialogues in his days there, fragments of which are
extant); but some of these dialogues became part of the Academy's
collection and were in later years mistaken for dialogues written by
Plato. They were not forgeries, for they were not written with the
intent to deceive, but the works of some of the later Academics. On
the other hand, there were forgeries: in the Hellenistic period (after
the death of Alexander the Great), it was lucrative to compose and
sell dialogues and treatises under the names of famous persons from
the earlier time. In any case, the library copies of the works
themselves are not extant; only the titles—and not all of
those—are recorded.

3.
Among comic playwrights known to have mentioned Socrates are Callias
(who was earliest, in or before 429) and Teleclides, both of whom
insinuated that Socrates helped Euripides to write tragedies—as
did Aristophanes in a fragment of the earlier version of
Clouds; Amipsias, whose Connus was named for
Socrates's music teacher and who calls Socrates
“barefoot”; and Eupolis, who accuses Socrates of splitting
hairs and stealing a wine ladle.

4.
Leo Strauss, an influential political theorist and adherent of the
German tradition discussed below (§2.2), is the chief proponent
of the superiority of Xenophon as a source, “Plato is not a
historian. The only historian among Socrates's contemporaries on whose
writings we must rely for our knowledge of Socrates is Xenophon, who
continued Thucydides's history, and who vouches for the authenticity of
at least some of his Socratic conversations by introducing them with
expressions like ‘I once heard him say’” (1966, 4;
cf. 1964, 56-57). When Strauss looks to Plato for support of
Xenophon's Socrates, he is attracted to the Socrates of
Theages (1968, 55), Minos (1968, 65-75), and
Hipparchus (1968, 74-75) rather than to the Socrates of
Plato's genuine dialogues. His insistence that all the works in the
tetralogies of Thrasyllus (~36 C.E.) are those of Plato himself (1964,
55), and that Plato depicts Socrates only in association with men of
higher social classes (1964, 57), is simply untenable; it would be
uncharitable to assume that Strauss would now hold such views in light
of more recent scholarship. In fact, he had no consistent account of
Socrates until late in life, something his disciple, Allan Bloom
(1974, 377), explains as the result of Strauss's late recognition that
“the execution of Socrates for impiety is the threshold to the
Platonic world,” which Strauss could not see before he discovered
esoteric writing in Alfarabi and Maimonides and realized the
irremediable conflict between reason and revelation. According to
Bloom (1974, 382), “In his last writings, he finally felt free
to try to grasp the way of Socrates, the archetype of the philosopher
and the one whose teaching Nietzsche and Heidegger most of all tried
to overthrow.”

5.
The two dialogues with fluid dramatic dates, across the Peloponnesian
wars (431-404), are Gorgias and Republic. A strong
tradition in German scholarship of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries was to think of Xenophon as the accurate historian and Plato
as the literary author, giving rise to claims that Plato shuffled
dates around and invented named Athenian characters for his literary
purposes, that the characters he invented had names coded to
communicate subtle truths about their bearers, and that Plato would
not use living Athenians as characters in his dialogues (impossible to
claim, finally, because the gravestone of Lysis turned up in a
construction trench northeast of the Piraeus in 1974, proving that
Lysis lived to be at least sixty, having died a grandfather).

6.
The term ‘developmentalism’ is used to distinguish the
influential Vlastosian approach to Plato's dialogues from those of
other analytic philosophers who addressed the Socratic problem and
other issues in Plato's dialogues during the heyday of
developmentalism. It should be noted, however, that—although
Vlastos consolidated and promoted the first complete
developmentalist program—he shared credit with a number of other
philosophers (e.g., W. David Ross, Richard Robinson, G. E. L. Owen)
who argued that Plato's views evolved. And it was Vlastos who took a
special interest in Socrates.